Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite move? Copy, poach, repeat. It made him one of the richest people on the planet. Now, he’s dusting off that playbook for his biggest challenge yet: the AI race.

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is on a hiring and buying spree, throwing eye-watering sums at top AI researchers and startups in a last-ditch effort to catch up to OpenAI, Google, and upstart rivals like DeepSeek. It’s a full-court press to convince the tech world and investors that Meta still matters in the AI race.

But here’s the twist: Zuckerberg is raiding everyone else’s.

THE MOVES

In the past few weeks, Zuckerberg AI team has:

• Poached talent like Alexander Wang (Scale AI co-founder) to lead a new AI Superintelligence Unit
• Offered $100 million+ packages to top researchers at OpenAI and Google (many said no), according to OpenAI’s CEO.
• Snapped up startups or tried to — from Scale AI to PlayAI, which clones human voices for natural conversations
• Talked with AI darlings like Perplexity AI, Rybway, and even Safe Superintelligence

So far, Meta has nabbed several big names: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai (formerly OpenAI), and others like Trapit Bansal and Jack Rae, who left Google DeepMind. The company also reportedly tried (and failed) to lure high-profile AI researchers like OpenAI’s Noam Brown and Google’s Koray Kavukcuoglu.

The unit’s mission? To build AI systems smarter than humans. Yes, really.

This is Zuckerberg’s version of the Thanos snap: collect the stones, snap his fingers, and will himself to the front of the AI line.

Throwing Money at the Future

Zuckerberg is also throwing cash at startups. Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and is in talks to acquire PlayAI, which develops eerily human-sounding voice agents. There were also feelers sent to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati’s new lab Thinking Machines.

If it feels like Zuckerberg is panic-buying his way through the AI mall before the shelves are empty, that’s because he kind of is.

Meta’s AI assistant, Meta AI, is currently no match for OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, or DeepSeek’s R1. Those models can reason. Meta’s can reply. It’s like asking a toddler to outwit a chess master.

And that’s the problem: Meta doesn’t just want to catch up; it wants to leapfrog. Zuckerberg knows he can’t wait years for homegrown breakthroughs. So he’s doing what he’s always done best: copy, buy, and scale fast.

It’s the Facebook playbook all over again. Stories, Reels, Threads: all riffs on rival ideas. And now, AI.

THE STAKES

Why does it matter?

Meta is behind in the AI race. Big time. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek’s R1 can reason, plan, and problem-solve. Meta’s AI? It’s still playing catch-up, better at small talk than solving real problems.

What’s Zuckerberg’s goal?

Build AI that can think and reason, like OpenAI’s and Google’s best systems,  and do it fast enough to stay relevant in the AI arms race.

Why now?

OpenAI’s next models are about to go open source. That could erase Meta’s last advantage: its free, open AI models that developers love.

Zuckerberg has declared 2025 the year of AI for Meta. It has to be. The company’s ad business is under pressure, Threads is floundering, and TikTok is still eating Instagram’s lunch. Meanwhile, OpenAI is flirting with becoming a full-on social network, threatening Meta on its home turf.

The new plan is to go all-in on “reasoning agents,” AI tools that can think through problems step-by-step, not just autocomplete your thoughts. These agents could power business assistants, customer support bots, or even future consumer apps.

But Meta needs one thing first: actual intelligence.

THE CRITICISM

Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman is rolling his eyes. In a recent podcast with his brother, he said Meta’s strategy is obvious: “copy OpenAI, try to poach talent, outspend everyone.” But Altman warns that copying doesn’t build a culture of innovation, and culture is what wins in the long run.

“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman told his brother. But “their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they’ve hoped. And I respect like being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”

He didn’t stop there.

“They started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses,” Altman said, adding:”It is crazy.” He accused Meta of “just trying to copy OpenAI, down to the UI mistakes,” Altman added.

Altman even called out Facebook’s addiction to attention-hacking, saying OpenAI wants to be “the only tech company that doesn’t feel adversarial.” Translation: Meta tries to hack your brain; we’re trying to help it.

New episode of Uncapped with @sama. Enjoy 🤗 pic.twitter.com/2IxYt3B4Gm

— Jack Altman (@jaltma) June 17, 2025

OUR TAKE

Zuckerberg has always been a fast follower, not a first mover. This worked for social media. And if history is any guide, he’ll land a few hits. He’s great at absorbing features, scaling fast, and bulldozing rivals with sheer force. But the AI race is different. It’s about innovation. So far, Meta’s biggest AI play is its wallet. Whether that’s enough to win a race where originality matters as much as firepower remains to be seen.

For now, Zuckerberg is betting that you can’t lose if you buy everyone who knows how to win. But in a world where AI shapes power, privacy, and the future of work, we all have a stake in whether these strategies actually produce safe, useful tech, or just more hype.